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Although supporting and assessing the non-academic “impact” of research are not entirely new developments in higher education, academics and research institutions are under increasing pressure to produce work that has a measurable influence outside the academy. With a view to supporting the solution of complex societal issues with evidence and expertise, and against the background of increased emphasis on impact in the United Kingdom's 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF2021) and a proliferation of impact guides and tools, this article offers a simple, easy to remember framework for designing impactful research. We call this framework “The 7Cs of Impact” – Context, Communities, Constituencies, Challenge, Channels, Communication and Capture.

Drawing on core elements of the Policy Institute at King's College London's Impact by Design training course and the authors' practical experience in supporting and delivering impact, this paper outlines how this framework can help address key aspects across the lifecycle of a research project and plan, from identifying the intended impact of research and writing it into grants and proposals, to engaging project stakeholders and assessing whether the project has had the desired impact.

While preparations for current and future REF submissions may benefit from using this framework, this paper sets out the “7Cs” with a more holistic view of impact in mind, seeking to aid researchers in identifying, capturing, and communicating how research projects can and do contribute to the improvement in society.

Building on the concept of “impact literacy” established in a previous paper from Bayley and Phipps, here we extend the principles of impact literacy in light of further insights into sector practice. More specifically, we focus on three additions needed in response to the sector-wide growth of impact: (1) differential levels of impact literacy; (2) institutional impact literacy and environment for impact; and (3) issues of ethics and values in research impact. This paper invites the sector to consider the relevance of all dimensions in establishing, maintaining and strengthening impact within the research landscape. We explore implications for individual professional development, institutional capacity building and ethical collaboration to maximise societal benefit.

The study showcases the social impact (online attention) of funded research compared to nonfunded for the BRICS nations. The key themes achieving online attention across the funded and nonfunded publications have also been identified.

A total of 1,507,931 articles published across the BRICS nations for a period of three (03) years were downloaded from the Clarivate Analytics' InCites database of Web of Science (WoS). “Funding Acknowledgement Analysis (FAA)” was used to identify the funded and nonfunded publications. The altmetric score of the top highly cited (1%) publications was gauged from the largest altmetric data provider, “Altmetric.com”, using the DOI of each publication. One-way ANOVA test was used to know the impact of funding on the mentions (altmetrics) across different data sources covered by Altmetric.com. The highly predominant keywords (hotspots) have been mapped using bibliometric software, “VOSviewer”.

The mentions across all the altmetric sources for funded research are higher compared to nonfunded research for all nations. It indicates the altmetric advantage for funded research, as funded publications are more discussed, tweeted, shared and have more readers and citations; thus, acquiring more social impact/online attention compared to nonfunded publications. The difference in means for funded and nonfunded publications varies across various altmetric sources and nations. Further, the authors’ keyword analysis reveals the prominence of the respective nation names in publications of the BRICS.

The study showcases the utility of indexing the funding information and whether research funding increases social impact return (online attention). It presents altmetrics as an important impact assessment and evaluation framework indicator, adding one more dimension to the research performance. The linking of funding information with the altmetric score can be used to assess the online attention and multi-flavoured impact of a particular funding programme and source/agency of a nation so that necessary strategies would be framed to improve the reach and impact of funded research. It identifies countries that achieve significant online attention for their funded publications compared to nonfunded ones, along with the key themes that can be utilised to frame research and investment plans.

The study represents the social impact of funded research compared to nonfunded across the BRICS nations.

Healthcare is indispensable for any civilisation to attain a good quality of life and well-being on both mental and physical levels. The healthcare domain primarily falls under pharma, medical, biotechnology, and nursing. Also, other fields may be aligned with these primary fields. Healthcare amasses the contemporary trends and knowledge of upcoming techniques to improve healthcare processes. The practitioners are primarily doctors, nurses, specialists and health professionals, hospital administrators, and health insurance.

It is a fundamental attribute needed for any society to attain good quality of life and well-being in mental and physical health. It is a fundamental right of people to receive good healthcare where drug treatment and hospitalization are available at a nominal cost, as a requirement of today’s modern era. There appears to be a significant disparity in the availability of good healthcare in rural areas compared to urban in India. Even though we enter the digital era with the facilities offered in Industry 4.0 and other advanced technologies brings about a significant change of overall processing within healthcare systems. During the pandemic of COVID-19, there has been digital transformation with success globally. Healthcare cooperatives are a new norm to support the healthcare systems globally. The chapter discusses Gampaha healthcare cooperative and reviews Ayushman Sahakar scheme in India. The reforms require time to evolve.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the intersection of research on impact investing and its closely related financial vehicles.

The paper explores 196 articles collected from Scopus and Web of Science using bibliometric and content analysis methodologies.

Despite a growing academic interest in impact investing, scholars generally investigate impact investing as a social phenomenon, using the specific financial mechanism of social impact bonds. This perspective potentially deflates the complex nature of impact investing, which actually combines both social and financial targets and uses a plurality of financial vehicles to reach its goals.

The emerging themes identified will provide both academics and practitioners additional tools to further the debate on impact investing and the understanding of its potential and limits according to the different financial forms it takes. This review should pave the way for a discussion about the boundaries of the social impact sector itself.

Despite the strong international commitment toward impact investing, tensions still exist. A comprehensive overview on the relevant aspects not yet thoroughly investigated will foster the growth of impact investments.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first holistic overview of impact investing, that jointly examines both literature on impact investing and literature on the correlated financial products used in the industry. The result is a comprehensive report of what is known about impact investing in its different financial forms, opening up new pathways for future studies.

This study empirically aims to examine the collaboration between social enterprises (SEs) and impact investors (IIs), which are organisations with similar interests but with distinct logics, and in high demand in emerging economies with complex problems. Despite the significant economic contributions of these organisations, there have been limited studies examining how they collaborate in different contexts, including theoretical insights explaining how they gain partner fit from resource synergy.

Mainstream businesses use the compatibility and complementarity concepts to examine buyer–supplier strategic alliances. Using similar concepts in the context of hybrid organisations, the authors interviewed six pairs of SEs and IIs with dyadic relations in Nigeria, aiming to deeply understand how they align dissimilar logics in pursuing common goals in emerging economies.

The authors’ findings revealed how compatibility criteria from the institutional logics perspective and complementarity from social exchange theory guide collaboration between SEs and IIs in an emerging economy. Using these theories provides new insights that distinguish SEs and IIs collaboration from conventional theories on the internationalisation of businesses, which remained insufficient for understanding the cross-border operations of SEs.

The study holds practical implications for organisations, regardless of their size, international investors, governments, organisations and individuals desiring to pursue sustainable business agendas in emerging economies with huge impact opportunities and the process involved.

The outcomes of this study extend knowledge of the theoretical lens examining collaborative entrepreneurship from the perspective of hybrid organisations. It also challenged existing knowledge on collaboration between SEs and IIs, often characterised by potential tensions due to the dissimilarity of institutional logics of actors.

This case study was developed using data from secondary sources. The data was collected from the organization’s website, annual reports, press releases, published reports and documents available on the internet.

According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook (WEO), 775 million people worldwide would not have access to electricity even by 2022, with the majority of them living in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Cozzi et al., 2022). In SSA, energy poverty had been a serious issue over the years. According to the IEA, 600 million people lacked access to electricity in 2019, while 900 million people cooked with traditional fuels (Cozzi et al., 2022). A World Bank report from 2018 said many SSA countries had energy access levels of less than 25% (Cozzi et al., 2022). Energy poverty in SSA hampered sustainable development and economic growth.

Despite significant efforts to address this poverty, Africa remained the continent with the lowest energy density in the world. Although solar and other energy-saving products were appealing, their adoption rates were modest, and their distribution strategies were not particularly effective. The lack of electricity exacerbated a number of socioeconomic problems, as it increased the demand for and use of wood fuel, which caused serious health problems and environmental harm.

While working in Uganda, Katherine Lucey (Lucey) saw that having no electricity had negatively affected women’s health in particular because it was women who were responsible for taking care of the home. These effects were both direct and indirect. The women’s reliance on potentially harmful fuels for cooking, such as firewood and charcoal, resulted in their suffering from respiratory and eye problems, in addition to other health issues. Furthermore, the distribution of energy-saving and renewable energy items was seen as the domain of men, and there was an inherent gender bias in energy decisions. Women were not encouraged to participate in energy decisions, despite the fact that they were the ones managing the home and would gain from doing so. In addition, because there was no light after dusk, people worked less efficiently. Lucey saw the economic and social difficulties that electricity poverty caused for women in rural Africa. She also witnessed how the lives of a few families and organizations changed after they started using solar products. This motivated her to start Solar Sister with the mission of achieving a sustainable, scalable impact model for expanding access to clean energy and creating economic opportunities for women.

Solar Sister collaborated with local women and women-centric organizations to leverage the existing network. Women were trained, provided all the necessary support and encouraged to become Solar Sister Entrepreneurs and sell solar products in their communities and earn a commission on each sale. To provide clean energy at their customers’ doorstep, the Solar Sister Entrepreneurs received a “business in a bag” – a start-up kit containing inventory, training and marketing assistance.

Solar Sister’s business model empowered the women in SSA by providing them with an entrepreneurship opportunity and financial independence. Also, the use of solar products helped them shift from using hazardous conventional cooking fuels and lead a healthy life. The children in their households were able to study after sunset, and people in the community became more productive with access to clean energy.

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, however, had a serious impact on Solar Sister. It found it challenging to mentor and encourage new business owners due to restrictions on travel and on group gatherings. The Solar Sisters were unable to do business outside the house either. Their source of income, which they relied on to support their families, was therefore impacted. The COVID-19 outbreak also slowed down the progress achieved by the community over the years and made household energy purchasing power worse. Furthermore, the organization was also grappling with other issues like limited access to capital, lack of awareness and infrastructural challenges. Another challenge lay in monitoring and evaluating the organization’s impact on the last mile.

In the absence of standardized measurement tools and issues in determining the social impact of Solar Sister, it would be interesting to see what approach Lucey will take to measure the impact of Solar Sister on the society. What measurement tool/s will Lucey implement to gauge the social impact of Solar Sister?

This case is intended for use in PG/Executive-level programs as part of a course on Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainability.

The opening of government data is high on the policy agenda of governments worldwide. However, data release faces barriers due to limited support of civil servants, whereas the literature neglects civil servants' role in opening data. This paper aims at understanding why civil servants can be reluctant to support the disclosure of data. The authors developed a model to explain civil servants' behavioral intention to open data.

The authors test a series of hypotheses by collecting and analyzing survey data from 387 civil servants and by applying multivariate hierarchical regression.

The results indicate the factors influencing the behavior of civil servants. Social influences, performance expectancy, data management knowledge and risks have a significant influence. Personal characteristics control these effects.

Caution is needed to generalize the findings towards the support to open data provision by civil servants. Though the analyzed sample was limited to Brazil, other countries and cultures might yield different outcomes. Larger and more diversified samples might indicate significant effects on variables not found in this research.

The insights can be used to develop policies for increasing the support of civil servants towards governmental data disclosure.

This study suggests factors of influence to civil servants' behavior intentions to disclose governmental data. It results in a model of factors, specifically for their behavioral intention at the individual level.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework of green strategies as a combination of energy-efficiency measures and solutions towards environmental impact reduction for improving environmental sustainability at logistics sites. Such measures are examined by discussing the related impacts, motivations and barriers that could influence the measures' adoption. Starting from the framework, directions for future research in this field are outlined.

The proposed framework was developed starting from a systematic literature review (SLR) approach on 60 papers published from 2008 to 2022 in international peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings.

The framework identifies six main areas of intervention (“green strategies”) towards green warehousing, namely Building, Utilities, Lighting, Material Handling and Automation, Materials and Operational Practices. For each strategy, specific energy-efficiency measures and solutions towards environmental impact reduction are further pinpointed. In most cases, “green-gold” measures emerge as the most appealing, entailing environmental and economic benefits at the same time. Finally, for each measure the relationship with the measures' primary impacts is discussed.

From an academic viewpoint, the framework fills a major gap in the scientific literature since, for the first time, this study elaborates the concept of green warehousing as a result of energy-efficiency measures and solutions towards environmental impact reduction. A classification of the main areas of intervention (“green strategies”) is proposed by adopting a holistic approach. From a managerial perspective, the paper addresses a compelling need of practitioners – e.g. logistics service providers (LSPs), manufacturers and retailers – for practices and solutions towards greener warehousing processes to increase energy efficiency and decrease the environmental impact of the practitioners' logistics facilities. In this sense, the proposed framework can provide valuable support for logistics managers that are about to approach the challenge of turning the managers' warehouses into greener nodes of the managers' supply chains.

The growing importance of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, as well as related performance planning, measuring and reporting, has spurred interest in linking corporate sustainability and performance management systems (PMSs). In this context, the aim of this paper is to provide companies with a framework for implementing the requirements of the corporate sustainability reporting directive (CSRD) through a sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC). The framework will further the integration of sustainability with corporate governance.

The framework was grounded in the relevant literature and the CSRD requirements.

This paper provides companies with a novel framework for implementing the requirements of the CSRD through a SBSC. The framework specifies four key steps (i.e. identifying material themes, initial assessment, strategic formulation and action, and sustainability reporting) to integrate sustainability with corporate governance.

The framework supports managers’ decision-making processes in linking sustainability with strategy and providing a basis for integrating sustainability with corporate governance in organizations. The paper provides a way to practically address the CSRD requirements.

This is the first study integrating the emerging CSRD requirements with corporate governance. The paper advances discussion and debate by management scholars on how a SBSC can be practically implemented, providing details on how this may be achieved.